1st Conference

Enabling a Culture of Agility – Melbourne, 28 Feb & 1 Mar 2019

For people who want a deeper understanding of how to bring the principles of Agility to their wider organisation. 1st Conference’s talks and workshops will provide ideas and practical methods you can use to enable cultural agility across the entire business.

Why come to 1st Conference?

Adapt and stay relevant. Australian businesses are adopting new ways of working. The true benefits are unlocked by creating the conditions for all parts of an organisation; Finance, HR, Marketing, Sales and Technology etc. to enable cultural agility. 1st will help you find the bridge to organisational and personal agility.

Format. A mixture of talks and workshops, across the two days, continues our commitment to enhancing organisational agility and promoting deeper understanding.

Venue: the amazing Storey Hall at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Numbers are limited, for a, community-based, learning experience.

Commitment to diversity of speakers and facilitators

1st Conference is a 2 day, curated learning experience about adopting agile ways of working. You can interact with international speakers, local thought leaders and peers from the community.

Key Outcomes

Make sense of agility, and how it can work for you

Share your experiences in adopting agile ways of working throughout the whole organisation

Hear about the success and failure stories from other leaders and people in organisations and situations just like yours

See how agile is more than just a tool for Software Development

Understand what “good looks like”, in terms of organisational agility, on an international and local level.

Key Benefits

Come up to speed with agile’s impact on the workforce and position yourself as a leader in your field

A fully curated learning experience, designed to expand understanding about key components of agility

Be inspired and take away techniques from experts

A chance for you to network and share your experiences with peers

Return to your workplace with a clear idea of how you can improve its agility.

Speakers and Facilitators

Lisette Sutherland

Visiting us from the Netherlands, Lisette is a leading international expert on Remote teams and collaboration. She will be a keynote speaker at 1st Conference, and will also be running extra Work Together Anywhere workshops.

The lineup is hand picked from our Australian and overseas network of agile experts.

Local and international experts

Since 2015, 1st Conference has been delighted to welcomeexperts such as Alistair Cockburn, Jurgen Appelo, Joanne Molesky, Ben Linders and Ange Ferguson to our lineup.

Each day there will a mix of talks and workshops, with the aim to support Deep Learning by taking the concepts you hear about and reinforcing them with practical techniques you can use right away.

The Heart of Agile

In 2017, we became the first event in the Southern Hemisphere to be structured around Alistair Cockburn's Heart of Agile framework. In 2019, we continue to frame the event around the pillars of the Heart of Agile; "Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect and Improve".

Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.

— Alistair Cockburn, original signatory to the Agile Manifesto

Key enhancements in 2019

In designing 1st Conference 2019, we want to:

Iterate with the format…we were first event in the Southern Hemisphere to be based upon the “Heart of Agile” concept. It seeks to get back to the roots of what Agile is really all about and is the result of decades of experience that Dr Cockburn has, working with organisations and teams who want to find better ways to work.

Create meaningful Learning Opportunities and deeper understanding1st Conf will run over two days and is designed to be an experience for delegates to cover the Heart of Agile of concepts of Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect and Improve. With top class experts from overseas and also from our region.

Each day will seek to deepen understanding through both talks and a series of practical workshops. The workshops will teach practical techniques that attendees can take back to their workplaces and put to immediate use.

Support diversity. We as organisers, support diversity in tech and we commit to enhance the diversity of speakers and workshop facilitators. In 2017, the majority of presenters and facilitators were female. As well as gender diversity, we want to keep reflecting the community that we serve and include more diverse people in our lineup.

2019 Sponsoring partners

Partners

We will be announcing our partners here. Would you like to become one? Please email us.

1st Insights

Articles and interviews, by and with the people involved with 1st Conference.

This is the final video in our series about the Heart of Agile and how 1st Conference is using the 4 areas of, "Collaborate", "Deliver", "Reflect" and "Improve", to assist you to self-educate and then improve agility in your place of work.

In this video, Alistair gives you some ideas for how you can approach your experience at 1st Conference (or at any learning event), to get the most out of the experience. For those of you more inclined to read than watch, I've summarised what he had to say in text below the video for you.

If you've been following the series of videos about Heart of Agile and how 1st Conference is using it, you will have heard about some of the thinking behind HoA and how it can act as a bridge to Organisational Agility..

In this video (5 of 6), Alistair suggests a practical exercise to help you start improving collaboration within your organisation.

In this edition (number 4 of 6) - Alistair simplifies the idea of Organisational Agility in a way that clearly articulates what it means, and then steps you through how each of the Heart of Agile quadrants can be used as markers to take you there. It's an incredible way to explain something, and really worth spending the time to watch and digest. It'smy favourite part of the entire interview.

This is the third part of a series of 6 videos from a 30 minute interview with Alistair Cockburn, that are being published in the next couple of weeks. We hope it helps you understand why 1st Conference is structured around the Heart of Agile, give you some tips on how you can use Heart of Agile, and help you think about how you could get the most from coming to the conference.

In this video, Alistair encourages me to explain the idea behind using the Heart of Agile as the format for 1st Conference this year, and what our intention is in doing it. We also hope it aligns with our goal of developing content that adds value over time and helps you to learn and develop your skills.

Details

Storey Hall

1st Conference is proud to be supported by RMIT University and happy to return to RMIT's Storey Hall. We appreciate the support of RMIT Organisational Development, IT, Venue Booking and Storey Hall management for their help in the lead up to 1st Conference.

First built as the Hibernian Hall, the building was renamed in 1959 to honour two members of the Storey family with close links to RMIT. Sir John Storey Senior, a pioneer of Australia’s automotive and aircraft industries, was Melbourne Technical College Vice President 1944-1945. His son, John Storey Junior, was a former Student Representative Council president.

It was remodelled as the iconic Storey Hall in 1995, when it received an ultra-modern extension, featuring geometric-shaped windows and tiles. While the remodelling preserved the original, heritage-protected building, the extension includes references to Melbourne’s architectural past, while showing what can be done with modern design and architectural techniques and technology.

The building is now home to the RMIT Gallery and includes a large auditorium and function space. It was originally built for the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society in 1887 – and the extensive use of green in the extension’s exterior references that Irish heritage.

By Community Learning Experts, Tabar. The organisers of 1st and LAST Conferences, Spark the Change and Be 1st Adelaide.